Systematic Analysis of Professional and College Team Sports and Players

Saturday, November 8, 2014

Competitive Balance in MLS

Now that the Major League Soccer regular season is over let's take a look at competitive balance in MLS for the 2014 season. Using the Noll-Scully measure of competitive balance under the trinomial distribution (since ties are a part of the MLS) I find that competitive balance is higher for the 2014 regular season than the average over the last 15 seasons. The Noll-Scully for 2014 is 1.488 which is still more competitive than the other "major" US sports leagues. Yet the average Noll-Scully has been increasing - meaning that competitive balance is decreasing over the last five years. Here is the Noll Scully since the 2000 regular season.